Archive for the ‘talking parrots’ Category

We take a look at the breaking news on Higgs Bosons, materials tougher than diamonds, inserting objects in pictures become more realistic, Hubble research hits a milestone, dinosaurs, talking parrots, down-loadable knowledge, information on the unbelievable Lunar eclipse we just had, a quick spacecraft update and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Higgs-Boson confirmation just around the corner?

The Higgs mechanism explains how most of the known elementary particles obtain their mass and would make up a field of particles stretching the entire universe

The Higgs particle would be the carrier of that field, and is thought to give mass to other particles, and thus to objects and creatures in the Universe.

The Higgs boson is a pivotal part of the standard model of particle physics

The Standard Model concerns all interactions which control dynamics of known subatomic particles but does not incorporate the physics of dark energy nor of the full theory of gravitation

Significance

The Higgs theory has been around now for almost 50 years

Finding the Higgs Boson was one of the main reasons of why the Large Hadron Collider was built

Finding it would be an enormous scientific breakthrough for physics and would help explain why different particles have different masses.

This year the LHC has generating 400 trillion proton-proton collisions, almost six times more than expected

The tricky part is figuring out whether the tracks really are evidence of a Higgs boson – or just unrelated noise.

Higgs Boson particle are thought to have a mass of between 114 and 185 GeV, gigaelectronvolts. A proton, the positively charged particle in the nucleus in an atom, is 1GeV.

Reports in July showed tantalizing data spikes between 120 and 140 GeV suggest that the Higgs mass might lie in that range, but the data was not reliable enough to make any scientific claims

Prior results from particle colliders had effectively ruled out a Higgs outside the range of 114 GeV to 141 GeV.

On Dec 13, two Large Hadron Collider teams reveal the results of their research, highlighting ten candidates that had shown evidence of Higgs

Those ten candidates were found from the remains of about 350 trillion collisions using the ATLAS (AToroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detectors.

* Of Note*

Tuesday’s data will not be confirmed until they are able to produce repeated evidence in future experiments, the confirmation is expected to happen around summer 2012.

Atlas and CMS said they see “spikes” in their data at roughly the
same mass: 124–125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV; this is about 130 times as
heavy as the protons found in atomic nuclei).

124GeV = 212 quintillionths of a gram (that’s period followed by 14
zero’s thena 1)

ATLAS has observed a signal of a Higgs particle at 125 GeV with a significance level of 3.5 sigma — with 3 being enough to claim evidence but 5 needed for a discovery — and that CMS has seen one at 2.5 sigma

what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson

A level of “five sigma” is required to claim a discovery, meaning there is less than a one in a million chance the data spike is down to a statistical fluke.

The “three sigma” level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row

Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row

This compression results in different forms of carbon with novel electronic and mechanical properties

Significance

Scientists have discovered a new carbon polymer that simulations show is hard enough to crack diamond

A material doesn’t have to be stronger than diamond to be able to crack it, it only need a higher compression strength.

Compressive strength is the capacity of a material or structure to withstand axially, kind of like wood grain, directed pushing forces.

The scientists are now using a recently developed technique called the Crystal Structure Analysis by Particle Swarm Optimization, a computational method

* Of Note*

Harder, stronger, and the ability to cut along specific axes of a material are all unique physical properties ering various compressed allotropes of carbon that defeat diamond in various ways and some have only been proven in simulation

There is a long-standing puzzle in astronomy known as the ‘carbon crisis’ in interstellar dust

Observations by the Hubble telescope reveal carbon dust distortions in light, deep red, that would require more carbon that we have previously thought was there

Five space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble from 1993 to 2009 repaired various components of the telescope and upgraded it with ever more powerful instruments.

Deorbit planned ~2013–2021

Significance

Hubble Space Telescope has accumulated 10,000 science papers based on its observations.

Thousands of astronomers around the world in over 35 countries have been engaged in Hubble research

The five top referenced science papers are, in order: the search for distant supernovae used to characterize dark energy; the precise measurement of the universe’s rate of expansion; the apparent link between galaxy mass and central black hole mass; early galaxy formation in the Hubble Deep Field; and the evolutionary models for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs.

The 10,000th paper reports on the identification of the faintest supernova ever associated with a long-duration gamma-ray burst – an intense gusher of high-energy radiation following the death of a star.

* Of Note*

Hubble’s archive contains data from over 1 million exposures and the number of science papers written based on Hubble archival data has increased to the point where it has eclipsed the number of papers resulting from new observations.

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

DAWN Spacecraft reachest closts orbit to the asteroid Vesta

Dimensions: About 578 by 560 by 458 kilometers (359 by 348 by 285 miles)

Shape: Nearly spheroid, with a massive chunk out of the south pole

Rotation: Once every 5 hours, 20 minutes

About the length of Arizona, it appears to have a surface of basaltic rock – frozen lava – which oozed out of the asteroid’s presumably hot interior shortly after its formation 4.5 billion years ago, and has remained largely intact ever since.

DAWN:

Launch Date : Sep 27, 2007

Mission will go through through July 2015

Framing Camera (FC) : Scientific imaging system of the Dawn Mission to the two complementary protoplanets, 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta.

Gravity Science : The team utilizes the radio link used for communications and carefully observe the Doppler shift in the link’s carrier frequency (when received at ground stations) due to
gravitational forces acting on the spacecraft center-of-mass in the environment of Vesta and Ceres.

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

Dec 15 1612 – 399 years ago – A telescope meets the Andromedo galaxy : [Simon Marius](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Marius, namer of Jupiter’s 4 inner satellites, is first to observe Andromeda galaxy through a telescope. Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, but not the closest galaxy overall. The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi wrote a tantalizing line about it in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964, describing it as a “small cloud”.

**Dec 14 1807 – 204 years ago – Meteorite gets scienced ** : In Weston, (now called Easton) Connecticut at 6:30 am, a meteorite was seen with an aparent size of 2/3 the size of the moon. Eyewitnesses reported three loud explosions, as it fell and broke apart to fall in at least six locations. This meteor became the first to fall in the New World to be documented, collected, and chemically analyzed and received much attention in the national and international press. The largest and only unbroken specimen weighing in at 36.5 pounds (16.5 kilograms) was recovered and made a hole 5 ft long and 4.5 ft wide (1.5 m long and 1.4 m wide) now resides within the oldest collection of meteorites in the United States. Out of the approximately 350 pounds of the meteorite that fell on the town of Weston, less than 50 pounds can now be accounted for. Yale Peabody Museum – Weston Meteorite

**Dec 17 1903 – 108 years ago – The Wright brother fly ** : In 1903, the first powered flight was achieved by the [Wright brothers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights in the Kitty Hawk, at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina. That morning, the biting cold wind had a velocity of 22 to 27 miles an hour. As ten o’clock arrived, the Wrights decided, nevertheless, to get the machine out and attempt a flight. Orville Wright launched from a track, taking off into the wind. The aircraft covered 120 feet, aloft for 12 seconds. Thus for the first time, a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started. First flight photo

Looking up this week

You might have seen …

On Dec. 8th, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed an unusual event on the sun: An erupting cloud of plasma was eclipsed by a dark magnetic filament. VIDEO By studying how the light of the explosion is filtered by the foreground material, SDO mission scientists might be able to learn something new about dark filaments on the sun.

Keep an eye out for …>

Wed, Dec 14 : Orion is up in the east-southeast after dinnertime, and higher in the southeast later in the evening. IMAGE

Thurs, Dec 15 : The Moon has a bright companion as it rises late this evening: Regulus, the brightest star of Leo, the lion, sits to it’s upper left.

Fri, Dec 16 : Mars is close to the upper left of the Moon as they climb into view after midnight, and looks like a bright star.